


apparent loss of information already encoded and stored (I Am Sharing My Skull)

by henryclerval



Series: I Am [2]
Category: Almost Human
Genre: Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Robots, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 08:44:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henryclerval/pseuds/henryclerval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He debates, internally, the morality of wishing for horrific accidents so that he has reason to stay for longer hours out in this world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	apparent loss of information already encoded and stored (I Am Sharing My Skull)

There’s something new and distracting about his partner. 

He had stepped outside his home, his nothing, his four walls quieting with the thud of the door behind him. He’s more than happy to leave it behind, to lock the door and shut it out for another handful of hours. 

He debates, internally, the morality of wishing for horrific accidents so that he has reason to stay for longer hours out in this world. 

Stepping onto the landing—feet inches from the sidewalk that leads to the curb that starts his day, far from the weight of that makeshift portrait—he stops. Turn his head upward. Smelling the air—smelling very loosely defined; he identifies the molecules hovering around him, gives them a mood—and feels the sunshine. Memorizes and stores the patterns of how his sensors pick up, how his synthetic skin reacts to the warmth. 

His fingers are cold where they hang at his side, not yet blooming into pain from the brisk chill that hangs from where he scribbled, disowned his masterpiece in a fit of embarrassment. And there in the rising sunlight, as it draws down his brow and eyelids, Dorian wonders if he feels pain. He can inflict pain, absolutely—but he isn’t aware, yet, if he may feel it. Physical pain—the ache in his limbs to match the empty throb in his chest, his throat, crawling across his shoulders. The straps of his gun holsters dig into his shoulders and Dorian’s fingers twitch upward, slightly. Miniscule movement, barely a breath in spatial concerns, but it goes unnoticed. The sunlight has moved down his nose and cheekbones and he can feel each square inch of his skin begin to flush with warmth and unaware, unknowing, of how his fingertips move on their own volition. 

John’s car grinds softly and it isn’t enough to pull him from his reverie. He hears it before John can pull up, before he hears music attempt to leak out of cracks between window and door and metal and metal and Dorian considers if that’s how he must sound—tiny escaping scraps of melody disrupting the world around him. 

But this is daylight. This is daylight and sunshine and work to do, people who need his abilities and are drowning in their own desperation. This is when he does not think about what he does is more important than who he is, when he buries frustration that has a dangerously low boiling point. 

This is daylight and it’s punctuated by John’s car door opening rather than the window cracking down. The music isn’t as loud now, filtered out by the crunch of gravel underneath worn shoes and the clink of beads and bracelets on roof. Dorian can tell it’s John before he opens his mouth, before he leans his weight against the suspension, before John clears his throat and pans out—

_You realize you’re outside, Sleeping Beauty?_

The retort is easy, practiced, already twirling the edge of Dorian’s mouth as he begins to step down onto the sidewalk, toward the curb, their daily routine of back and forth, this and that, him taking comfort in this predictable nip at his heels; the ache, however, is sudden. His step halfway complete and this sensation is something that doesn’t belong in the daylight, when he’s warm and away from the two chairs and rackety bedframe that isn’t used. It’s the pain, phantom though it may be, that’s reserved for the tiny hours of the morning—when frost and dew are his paints and he has time to think about him and her and she and he and all of them, and him. 

His expression must have changed because when he opens his eyes and looks over to his partner’s voice, John’s playful frown has lost its adjective. Dorian can count the folds between John’s eyebrows and the wrinkles that multiply on his face and it’s strange, out of place, and the urge to wipe it clean, to smooth out those fault lines is loud in his limbs. He can see himself doing it—as simple as walking over and running his thumb across old war lines and laugh lines and scowls that have left their marks and stories, connecting freckle to freckle. 

What happens after is beyond him; predictions are a laughable, fleeting grasp in a world that allows John to be considered functioning. 

His want to be functioning for John, to be relied on and a necessity, pulls Dorian out of his momentary spark of fear. John has his head raised and palm flat on the roof of the car, quiet and observing. Aware that something is wrong. That this footstep has not fallen normally and the pavement feels awkward and strange and Dorian doesn't want to continue on—he watches John watching him, and searches his recent memory to place the sensation burning up his insides, erupting on his neck and ears and turns the warm sunbeams on his cheekbones to scorched badlands. 

Dorian manages a smile and enough steps to make it to the car, to let himself in, to close his eyes and smell the plastic of the dashboard, leather that lines the gear shift, the mix of cheap shampoo and olive oil that has permeated through years of use and life, and ignores the strained quiet that John brings into their commute. 


End file.
